Guerrilla USA: The Assault on Floridan – An ARMA 3 Simulation, by GuerrillaLogistician

If you read my last article about ARMA 3, you would know I do have some great things to say about it. However, ARMA remains a game with all its faults. Similar to the fictional author “Angry American”, it will simply provide a rough template to help organize your thoughts in such a situation. That being said, there’s always creativity in every situation that requires a kind of nuance that cannot be preplanned.

I linked to a video from a series called “The Big Picture” (circa 1960s) for good reason. Not only do you see in this video what I assumed to be the precursor to operation Robin Sage, you also see in the video that the people in the town get to choose who they work for at that time. A father is betrayed by his daughter to the communists after the father protects and cares for one of the guerilla fighters. While the video shows you a great staging of a very interesting 1960s style interactions, I know for a fact that the guerrillas at Robin sage are a little harder to convince. There are things that I would never want to do in real life and would find training for them near impossible. We think about these things when we read books, and sometimes the books create a fictional environment that isn’t reality based. This can definitely lead to situations where you make poor assumptions that would never work in reality.  The other problem is sometimes creators fall into the trap of emulating art into people, to the point that it becomes unrealistic. Are the examples in the game realistic? Honestly, there’s no way to tell but at least you can play out different scenarios without risking any “real life consequences”, provided you’re an honest player.

Our game master set up a situation with radio frequencies and ARMA’s basic signal intelligence capabilities. Much like the books from the Going Home series by A. American, the game master sets up a situation where all hell breaks loose by unseen assailants. Let me set the scene for you: this time, instead of a bomb in a bazaar, it was a sniper at a food dispensing location.  Shots ring out and people were hit, although none of our party had been hit. As a group, we decided to assist the local Police Department not only because we had decided originally to work with them, but also because the community was in danger. Realizing we are in a video game playing under a gamemaster’s rules,  we had to “play the game” and assault a building and clear a room or two. While some of the people playing have done that in real life, others have only merely trained to do that, and the remaining are untrained civilians. Realistically, I probably wouldn’t have gone into the building as I am not as skilled or have enough experience for that task. That said, as much as this can be educational it is also still a game and that needs to be recognized which I hope I have pressed home by now. What the gamemaster did was set up a sniper hide with sleeping bags, uniforms discarded by the enemy, and absolutely no trace other than the weapon they left which was a hunting rifle.

Some realistic questions I have: how do you track down someone who just left the area? Where would they be going? The attack was in line of sight of where you had been just moments before and some of the civilians you came across said they saw somebody running north. Were these the shooters or just other people in town getting supplies that ran from the gunshots? As an aside during the last game, we had talked a lot about signals intelligence mainly to do with what NCScout was selling on his website. The TinySA Ultra, which looks surprisingly like one of the devices in ARMA was the topic of conversation. I actually intend to make the ARMA styled direction finding device out of my TinySA ultra. The game master, being an alumni, had a rough idea of the frequencies that might be used by enemy forces.  When the trail went cold for us there was a casual suggestion to use the device to see what was in the air. In this game we have to role play some things and I am still shocked to this point that someone who is so entrenched in signals and wireless communication that I didn’t put more emphasis on the topic.  We had discussed using the prop as a placeholder for a hack RF originally, and gear wise I had discussed carrying my DJ-X11 scanner.

Arma 3 Images

TinySA Ultra Screen

Right now, ARMA can’t give us realistic comms and anyone who’s got any sense will be running something hard to trace. ARMA also doesn’t allow the signal to drop and come back so when you look for signals it is always there, but I’m sure there’s a way to do that. There are some positives about the game when it comes to SIGINT training, spikes of signal on different frequencies need to be identified, direction finding is fairly realistic and the strength of the signal increases as you get closer. Pulling out the radio equipment in game we did a quick search in the 360 from our location, writing down every single source we could find. We compared the frequencies to know entities like the EMA, Police, and local milita groups we had meet. Finding an anomaly for the area we started moving towards that location. As we moved the signal strength grew but realistically, we didn’t have a good location yet, only a bearing. Much like the submarines of World War II, we started tracking in a different direction after putting a bearing line on the map. We would halt every so often get a new reading, verify the signal strength, and pull out our compasses/ maps. Soon we had a location on the map. I will spare you the details of what happened, but let’s just say Easton had a forward observation post. Add to that the people that we were searching for weren’t there. The game master later told us he had placed the outpost down for future gaming content, never thinking we would track down that signal first.

What you realize very quickly is even when someone creates a picture-perfect game world that is simplified, and straightforward signals intelligence isn’t easy. The mechanics of signals intelligence aren’t overly difficult. Neither is using a map, compass, and a Periscope to figure out the direction and speed of a merchant ship in Japanese waters. Many people play realistic games of World War 2 American naval Subs sinking Japanese supplies. That said, those people playing the games have a better understanding of how a torpedo is shot than someone off the street.  I bet you a very nice steak that those same people couldn’t climb into a World War 2 submarine and accurately hit a target like they do on the computers. We were dealing with maybe six or seven different transmissions that were continuously active. Realistically however if the people were dumb, they would be hard to track in the first place, and if they were smart, they may not have been transmitting at all or for only a few seconds. The fact is signals intelligence is important and complicated. It is also something that we generally forget even when we have experience with such devices because of the amount of time it takes to practice and pull out the gear. Lastly remember sometimes you will be persecuting an objective you think is your target, but really isn’t.